Entertainment

'American Crime Story' writers on how they built suspense into the ending we knew was coming

'The People Vs. O.J. Simpson' concluded its run on FX Tuesday night. Mashable spoke to the writers about the climax we knew was coming and how they turned history on its head. In this still from the episode: Nathan Lane as F. Lee Bailey, David Schwimmer as Robert Kardashian, Cuba Gooding, Jr. as O.J. Simpson, Courtney B. Vance as Johnnie Cochran, and John Travolta as Robert Shapiro.

Image: Prashant Gupta/FX

By Scott Huver2016-04-06 03:30:00 UTC

The verdict is in, and it was a shocker.

Not, of course, the outcome of the infamous trial of the century as depicted in the tenth and final episode of American Crime Story: The People Vs. O.J. Simpson. That, we all knew, was coming. And not the depiction of the acquittal and its immediate aftermath, either.

After the previous nine searing but sensitive, often soulful, sometimes satiric episodes exploring the inherent issues and personalities at the heart of the Trial of the Century, it seemed fairly certain that the finale would stick the landing, and it did.

The surprise came for executive producers and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski — Hollywood's masters of the biopic genre who’ve cinematically told the tales of the rich, famous, odd and off-kilter, including filmmaker Ed Wood (Ed Wood) and pornographic publisher Larry Flynt (The People Vs. Larry Flynt).

Rather than find the audience for their first foray into event-series television simply indulging in lurid nostalgia over an infamous, two-decade old story, the writing duo was "happily shocked" to see how well their attempt to tell the tale with artistry and insight was actually going over. Episode after episode, viewers entered into deeply thoughtful instant exchanges about the still-hot button topics the story brought to the surface — issues like race, celebrity, justice, ego, domestic violence, police corruption –- and contemplatively reevaluated their long-held assessments of the various figures at the heart of the tale.

With the show now drawn to a conclusion, Alexander and Karaszewski joined Mashable for an insightful post-mortem on their most ambitious effort to date, including revealing the trickiest challenges they faced, the territory they still didn’t have room to explore, the next high-profile crime story on their cinematic rap sheet and discovering the surprising fate of that real-life statue of O.J. Simpson that stood in the athlete’s backyard.

A scene from the finale of 'The People Vs. O.J. Simpson.'

Image: Prashant Gupta/FX

MASHABLE: What did you make of the public’s reaction to the show? As you started to see how people felt about the show, how people felt about the O.J. case, about the issues raised by the show – how did that reaction hit you?

Scott Alexander: We were sort of happily shocked and surprised to see this intelligent discourse that followed the show around. We’ve never done TV, so we’ve never seen this instant feedback, every Wednesday morning, every Tuesday night. People watching this show were discussing the issues of race and police, and gender politics in the workforce, and why celebrities get treated different than other people, and talking about these ideas really intelligently.

It was really fascinating. It’s sort of like the show had unleashed some kind of liberal arts symposium where people could just sort of discuss and debate, but without picking fights. I wasn’t seeing the divisiveness of 20 years ago when people weren’t taking a step back and saying, “What have we learned and what have we not learned in 20 years?”

Jessica Blair Herman and Joseph Siravo in a scene from 'The People Vs. O.J. Simpson.'

Image: Prashant Gupta/FX

Larry Karaszewski: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think we always knew the story would be compelling and we always hoped — we crossed our fingers — that people would actually tune in, and we were really happy that they did. But what really surprised us was that level of discourse, and the fact that people were not only talking about the issues, they also were discussing these people in a different light.

So many people have come up to us over the past couple months saying, “You know what? I hated Marcia Clark during the trial, but man, I watched your show and I just can't believe what she was going through.” Or they said, “I was so rooting against Johnnie Cochran, but your show really shows me that he really believed in this mission against the police brutality.” Same with Chris Darden, same with a lot of these characters. I feel like people somehow were able to re-evaluate visions on issues and people through us making drama out of this case.

As some of the real people involved in the case started making appearances in the media and commenting on the show, I’m curious what your takeaway from that was, and did you get a chance to actually interact with some of these folks once the series started airing?

Karaszewski: Not really. We got to hang out with Marcia Clark a bit, because Sarah Paulson became friendly with her towards the end of production. But we pretty much have steered clear of the real people. We felt that there was so much research we did that during production, we didn’t actually want to meet the real people. We had a conception, and we felt that they had all written books and there was so much written about them that we didn’t necessarily need to talk to them to get their take.

But what’s been nice, I think during the course of the airing, is that most of these people felt it was going to be an exploitation, and I think that people have started watching it and jumped on board to what we were trying to do.

If you ever got a chance to spend time with O.J. Simpson, what would you want to ask him?

Alexander: I would want him to give me a really specific timeline for that Sunday night. Sort of between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. He’s never really given a good answer.

What ended up, in the course of the project, being the biggest challenge -– the one thing that you were sort of waiting to see how the audience responded to?

Alexander: Chris Darden was our biggest challenge as a character because Chris was in this state of waffling in his life when the trial started. He was very unhappy at the DA; he wanted to quit. We knew he was going to be one of our primary characters.

Larry and I always liked to focus on characters with a driving passion, and Chris was kind of the opposite of this, where he was very unhappy at the DA, he wanted to walk away, and then through a series of events, he’s on the show. He finds himself as a second chair in the case. As we actually started writing the first couple scripts, Chris was really problematic in terms of, "How do you capture a guy and make the audience feel for him when he just seems so unhappy, and when he doesn’t even want to be there?"

It took a lot of tries at opening Chris’ scenes before we sort of came up with an approach that could work. Then when we got Sterling [Brown], who was so magnificent at capturing those nuances, Sterling made the audience feel for Chris and love Chris. Chris is a very complex, problematic guy, but Chris’ heart is always in the right place. So the fact that people responded to Chris so well makes me happy.

Karaszewski: And I think also the other big challenge is tackling events that people know so well, but presenting them in a fresh way. And I think that particularly was problematic in Episode 10. ... We knew we knew enough backstage drama and stuff that people hadn’t really looked into that we could make the other nine episodes really entertaining but also informative, but in Episode 10, we’ve got the verdict coming down. There’s this running gag: “Oh, no spoilers! Don’t tell me how it ends!” When you finally get to Episode 10, you do know how it ends. You do know what the verdict is.

Every second before the verdict, your stomach is knots.

I think our biggest challenge was how to make that still suspenseful. And I think we found that actually knowing what happens gives it a different kind of power, that you just see this tragedy unfold in slow motion in front of your eyes. Every second before the verdict, your stomach is knots.

I was particularly interested in and really impressed by the way that you handled the aftermath, all the way up to your conclusion. Can you talk about the creative decisions, where you decided and how you decided to end this story? Obviously, it keeps sputtering along over many years and we’re still talking about it.

Alexander: We open with O.J. as a celebrity who makes a chauffeur stumble on his words because he’s so excited to be in a car with him. And now our closing shot is O.J. knowing he’s lost that. He might have been acquitted, but he will never have his life back again. That bookending seemed very natural to us from the beginning. There wasn’t a lot of storytelling after the verdict. If we had gone more than a day or two post-verdict, we just wouldn’t have had anything left to talk about.

Karaszewski: Right. We always, from the very beginning, said it would be the night of the murders to the night of the acquittal. The challenge was to wrap up all the stories and give you a sense of what the aftereffect was for all these characters, in a very short period of time. It really was sort of a tragedy for just about everybody, except maybe Johnnie Cochran, who at least managed to get his point across to the public.

But even for O.J., that was the thing, we didn't want to say, "Oh, O.J. got the not guilty verdict, he can go back to his old life." That’s what O.J. thought he was going to be able to do, but we needed to infuse in those few moments we have back at his house a sense of, "Wait a second — O.J. is beginning to realize he can’t go back to being O.J. Simpson." He’s a different animal at this point.

When did the “ah-ha” moment of using the statue on his property as a metaphor hit you? Because that moment was golden.

Alexander: I’m pretty sure…Larry, the statue shows up in Jeff’s book right?

Karaszewski: Yeah. I think the "ah-ha" moment was more when we found out that O.J. actually had a statue in his back yard. Actually, it was in our script before Ryan [Murphy] became involved, but when Ryan found out that O.J. had a life-size statue of himself in the backyard, he really encouraged us to use it, and really saw that as a metaphor for exactly what it was.

No one knew what had happened to it, no one could find any documentation of it. We just had a lot of people say, "Oh yeah, I saw the statue. It was great." So they did their best based upon these descriptions. Then somewhere during the airing of the show — was it Flavor Flav?

Karaszewski: Yeah, Flavor Flav.

Alexander: Flavor Flav just like posted a photograph of the statue in his house. He owns it.

Karaszewski: Flavor owns O.J.’s statue.

Alexander: Who knew?

People Vs OJ I don't know were y'all got that fake statue of OJ from ,I got da reel one with me YALL,!!FLAVOR FLAV pic.twitter.com/65vuvIy3an

What was the surprise of your journey? Especially now that you’re here at the end point. What was the thing about this project that you didn’t expect?

Alexander: We talked big in the early days, never having done TV before, and we walked into Fox saying this is going to be like a Charles Dickens novel. It’s going to be 10 hours, and it’s going to go off in all these directions, and it’s going to cover all these themes, and it’s going to cover all these characters, and it’s going to be really cool, and great, and interesting, and smart. And they said, “Great great great.”

Somewhere — this was obviously years ago, and somewhere a couple years into that journey, I just think we looked at each other saying, "What the hell have we gotten ourselves into?" You can sit down and say you’re going to write a Charles Dickens novel, but then to actually have to go do it, it kind of just felt like a journey that was never going to end. So it’s really satisfying to have made it to the finish line in tact and that the show turned out really well and people appreciate it.

Obviously, this project took a lot of prep work, and now it’s a huge hit. I’m sure there’s a pressing demand for another season. Have you guys figured out what that means to you? How you might want to do it, if you want to do it? All those kind of questions that loom, now that people just loved this series?

Karaszewski: We’re very excited about the idea of doing more television. We’re going to produce a second season, but we’re not going to write the second season. We are actually writing an adaptation as a film of Jeff Toobin’s newest book that actually hasn’t been published yet about the Patty Hearst kidnapping. So that’s really where we’re specializing right now.

That sounds like a pretty enticing project on its own. What got you excited about that?

Alexander: Two words: Jeff Toobin. We were talking with Jeff, whenever it was, a year and a half ago: “What are you doing in L.A., Jeff?” “Oh I’m researching my new book on Patty Hearst.” We just lit up, and one thing led to another. We went and set it up at Fox 2000, and we were off to the races. It’s got some common themes in terms of celebrity and crazed media, and did she or didn’t she? It’s pretty rich.

Robert Morse as Dominick Dunne

Image: FX Networks

Was there any territory that you did find sort of fertile and intriguing on a story level, but even with 10 hours you couldn’t quite get it in there?

Alexander: I mean, there’s lots of crazy, interesting subplots. I can’t think of anything major that we didn’t have time for.

Karaszewski: Yeah, there were lots of plot things and a lot of goofy sidetracks. Whenever Scott and I watched the episodes with somebody, they always say, “Did that happen? Did that happen?” There were about another 40 incidents where it would be like, “Oh my God, really? Really?” So there was that kind of stuff. I don’t know in terms of big scenes or big issues.

I will say that at one point we talked a lot about in the early days of using the journalists, using Dominick Dunne, Jeffrey Toobin, and Dennis Schatzman — the African American man who was the lead reporter for the Los Angeles Sentinel — as a bit of a Greek chorus. As a way about talking about bringing some of these issues just blatantly up and discussed during the show. I think during the writing of the show, we realized you didn’t need this commentary track. The show itself was speaking to all these points. So we wound up using them less and less as we went along.

Alexander: Yeah, those were points, it was basically trying to take a lot of Jeff Toobin’s really clever sort of Monday morning analysis and contextualizing. He’s such a clever writer, and wanting to get those words into the show. But a lot of those words are very heady, and there’s just no way to put it into dialogue, by the regular people.

But we had sort of felt that well three journalists could be having these sort of smarty-pants discussions as the case goes along. But like Larry saying, it was over-reaching, and if we couldn’t get it into subjects, then we didn’t do it.

You ended the series on a note of acknowledging the real-life victims. Like Toobin’s book, you didn’t really feature anything really about them other than the fact that they were murdered and what came out in trial. But you did give a nice nod to them at the end of the series. What did that mean to you to take that opportunity to acknowledge Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman?

Karaszewski: We did do a lot of social satire in the show itself, and were very careful not to have any of that land on Ron or Nicole. We did want to include some of Fred Goldman, we have that speech in Episode 4 read very eloquently, talks about how his son is being overshadowed by the circus.

But for us, that last moment when we were doing the whatever happened to, I think there’s a real power to the fact that you’re sort of seeing how all these lives played out, and you end with the two people who didn’t have that opportunity, whose lives weren’t allowed to go on after that fact. I think that was absolutely the right way to respect the two of them.

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